Are you an animal? Are we part of an ecosystem? Are humans still evolving, with all of the other creatures around us?

The answer is YES, my friends. YES. We are mammals, we are animals, we are vertebrates, we are multi-celled organisms. We came from this world, our ancestors changing through time and space, stepping trembling webbed feet onto land and scurrying into burrows to avoid a hungry dinosaur, and reaching nimble fingers towards a glistening, golden fruit, and stepping out from the edge of the forest into unknown, open grasslands. Spreading across the world, over land bridges and expanses of ocean. Using fire, planting seeds, training other creatures to be our friends and tools. Wheels and pack animals allowing us to carry things in a way we never could before, developing specialties, building stronger houses. Learning about sanitation and disease so our loved ones could survive. Building strange contraptions that let us capture a moment in time, hear our mother’s voice on the other end, exchange information with people around the world. The world, once huge and incomprehensible, gets small. We share medicine, scientific advancements, philosophical wisdom with each other.

We share terrible things too, but the point here is that we aren’t some creature that appeared out of the blue and proceeded to change everything–we are born of this world, born of these animals and these plants, born of these bacteria and these oceans.

We believe we are so different from everything else (and everyone else) in the world, and it hurts us. It makes us feel like we can do anything we want, but just as harmful, makes us feel like we are hopeless, terrible creatures who have ruined everything. I believe that if we want people to care, to conserve, we need to bring back the positive aspects of being a part of the world. We need to acknowledge the amazing progress that humans have made. Our creativity, our innovation. We need to use the qualities that have brought us here to help us into the future.

I love when people embrace our place in the ecosystems of the world, and so was very excited to hear about the new BBC Earth program “Human Planet.” Each episode profiles people living in a certain landscape, like mountains or forests. It is simply amazing, and I love every second of it. The will of humans to live, and the universal desire to create a better life for your children than you had for yourself, is astounding.

I was really struck, watching the show, by the many advancements humans have made–advancements that required a single person to decide that the way their world was then wasn’t the way it always had to be. In one area, someone long ago carefully planted young mangrove trees, stringing the tender roots slowly across a river. Today, there are astonishing living bridges of thick, intertwined trees, allowing people to cross safely even during monsoons. In another place, a bat hunter once decided that if an opening was cut in the forest, many bats would probably try to fly through the easier-to-navigate short cut, and maybe, just maybe, a net could be strung up to catch them.

It is this ingenuity that has allowed us to not just survive, but thrive, in almost any environment.

My favorite part of the show was a story of a family in Tibet. They lived high in the snowy mountains, and wanted their two children to go to school. Their young girl was about 8 or 10, and accompanied her father on a 6 day trek along a frozen river through the mountains to get to the village where she would start school for the first time. It was very dangerous, and at a few parts along the way they had to navigate narrow shelves of ice about to break through, or climb down a “ladder” made of iron spikes driven into the rock. At each difficult section the father coaxed his daughter through, explaining how to move and where to put her feet. She was scared, and he guided her gently and with obvious pride at her accomplishments.

I have never had to do anything so difficult or life threatening, but it reminded me a bit of exploring the woods with my own father–crossing a river on a wire strung from bank to bank, or on a log that had fallen across. Probably the same age as the girl in Tibet, I was sometimes afraid, and I remember many times where my feet were pointed to certain safe locations, and I was encouraged to continue. I am sure there are other lucky people out there who could see their own lives in this experience as well. That love is so universal, and remains the same whether a situation is life threatening or just a weekend outing. It is the driving factor behind so many of our accomplishments, and we are all better for its existence.

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A father helps his daughter over a narrow part of the ice. To learn more about the “school run,” check out this post from Tim Allen: Source

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I was also, of course, moved by the amount of work and dedication this family put into their children going to school. Their love for their children was obvious, and shone through everything else. Next time I am driving to work I will think about how at least I don’t have to walk for 40 miles over thawing ice to get there. If they can do that, what can’t we all do?

It is time for us to embrace our humanity–to revel in it, to put our unique set of skills to use. Too often in conservation “people” is almost a dirty word. I disagree! Much of the damage people have done has been–truly, when you really come down to it–to give our children a better life, to help our parents live longer, to help stay in touch with each other, to have a comfortable place to sink into at the end of the day. If we continue to feel far away from the natural world, it can only get worse. But if we embrace our humanity, if we see ourselves in every woman, man, and child out in the world, if we use the same creativity and ingenuity that brought us fire, fishing poles, arrowheads, shelves, blankets, bridges, wheels, and nets to create a better place for our children and their children–now that is a future I would like to see.